Study: Cut datacenter power with bureaucracy, green tech

A new report from the Uptime Institute and McKinsey & Company takes a …

A new study from consulting firm McKinsey & Company with assistance from the Uptime Institute has concluded that current initiatives to reduce data center power consumption aren't adequately addressing the issue. Worldwide data center power consumption doubled between 2000 and 2006, and US power consumption alone will require an additional 10 power plants' worth of energy between now and 2010. According to McKinsey's report, these growth rates could be substantially curtailed by the adoption of energy efficient technology and the restructuring of certain corporate practices.

Modern data centers are energy inefficient for a number of reasons. During the data center design phase, energy efficiency is often a secondary concern (if its a concern at all) compared to questions of size, cooling capacity, and expandability. There's also a corporate disconnect between the chief information officer (CIO) responsible for coordinating build-out requirements and the CEO/CFO responsible for actually paying the energy bill. McKinsley recommends that companies bridge this gap by appointing an "energy Czar." Such a person would be charged with maximizing data center efficiency (and presumably corporate energy efficiency as well). The energy Czar would report to the CIO, but would also work within the IT department of any given organization. If properly executed, this would bridge the gap between the two departments.

Forrest emphasizes the importance of administrative oversight in multiple places within within the report, but it's hardly the only area he discusses. According to him, there are four factors that contribute to data center inefficiency. They are, in no particular order:

Lack of critical senior executive oversight, as described above

Poor/Nonexistent use of green technology; this includes failing to build the facility to take advantage of green technology.

Poor power and cooling design

Inefficient IT management

Improperly designed/implemented application software

If the McKinsey report's numbers are accurate, average server utilization in any given datacenter is just six percent of capacity, while as many as 30 percent of servers are "dead." Dead, in this case, refers to servers which are still mounted in main production space but do not exceed 3 percent utilization at any point. Total data center utilization, meanwhile, sits at just 56 percent. These are problems that can be significantly addressed through virtualization and consolidation, as even the marginal power consumption of a "dead" server adds up quickly.

Improving energy efficiency doesn't necessarily require a new data center, but it does mandate a different approach to data center resource allocation. Forrest's plan calls for data center floor plans to be subdivided and cooled depending on area-specific needs, and combines cabinets and server layouts in order to maximize energy efficiency instead of selling space to customers on a cabinet-by-cabinet basis. New data centers, meanwhile, should be designed to take full advantage of environmental conditions (by pulling cold air in directly from outside during the winter, for example), and should use water cooling instead of air cooling when possible. The report also calls for companies to "reduce the roll of support infrastructure (routers/SANS) to contain density requirements," and to optimize rack utilization by removing all unnecessary peripherals.

Finally, the joint Uptime-McKinsey report calls for companies to form a Corporate Average Data Efficiency (CADE) metric for measuring the relative efficiency of one data center versus another. This metric would serve the same purpose as the Congressionally mandated Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE). The goal would be to establish a single value for power efficiency that would quickly communicate or well (or badly) any given company was handling its energy consumption.

If there's a flaw in the report, it's the document's failure to consider the significant barriers to some of its proposals. Many of the McKinsey report's recommendations, if implemented, would require companies to hire new at least one new executive and may require additional IT staff as well. The need for efficient data centers in the long run is quite clear, and many of the study's recommendations are spot-on, but transitioning from here to there could be exceptionally difficult, particularly as company's struggle to update an IT infrastructure that may have been constructed 10 years prior under a very different set of expectations.